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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Spooktoberfest

Here's my piece for Dani and Jackie's Spooktoberfest, in which we had to incorporate the words cobwebs, jack-o-lantern, ghost, cauldron, and razor into a 300 word piece:

The only light I had to see by came from the flickering
candle inside the jack-o-lantern that sat in the corner of the room. During the
day it had looked like a non-threatening, smiling pumpkin, but now the shadows
that crowded around it and the flame that danced inside it made it look like
it had crawled out of a nightmare. I swept my eyes around the
room for the hundredth time; trying to convince myself I was safe. I would have
given myself more light, but I didn’t want to give them any more reason to find me. Though
really, could you hide from ghosts? I laughed softly at the thought, but it wasn’t
a happy laugh, it was the laugh of someone whose mind had melted into a miasma
of insanity; like a cauldron full of toils and troubles, something spun from
razor sharp nightmares that cut through the defenses I had tried to build up
like they were nothing but cobwebs. I had definitely lost my mind, because it
was Halloween night, and here I was sitting in a dark room with a pumpkin for company,
waiting for ghosts to come and claim me. They had warned me, but I hadn’t
listened.

A laugh resounded somewhere outside, and it sounded like
the laughter of some innocent soul who didn’t know what this night was really
about. Then the windows suddenly rattled as a gust of wind slammed into them; the
door shook and the candle flamed snuffed out, and that laughter abruptly became
a scream. And I was next.